Empathy, Reflection, and Mental Health

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an outline of the phenomenological approach to empathy training within the context concerned with mental health. The purpose of such a training is to educate professionals and researchers to reflect on their empathic presence within the reciprocal, we-relation of an interpersonal context. The idea is to foster an ethnographic attitude which is marked by an openness and acknowledgement of the other as an experiencing being who is reversible situated within an intersubjective world. In an applied phenomenological sense, the training adheres to the reversibility between science and philosophy as contextualized within the interpersonal situation of participant observation. The implication of such an approach, towards both practice and research, is described as to further our understanding of the experiential relationship between psychopathological phenomena and the mundane intersubjective context of everyday life. The interpersonal situation within professional practice is thus seen as the microcosm of what Karl Jaspers once pointed to as the tension between the individual and the social world.